For Molly, computer play in a simulated world connected strongly with off-line play. It reinforced her desire to create fictional worlds of her own. And it helped sharpen her understanding of that creative endeavor. In evaluating the imaginative and creafive worth of childhood activities, of course, this is the gold standard: that reading or watching television, that trips to the theater, to art and science ce museuns, an and id yyes, that play with computer games should stimulate personal en...

Worldplay appeared to be a solitary, or perhaps intimately shared, pastime. Over the years nearly everyone in my extended family heard or saw something of Kar, yet immersion in that make-believe remained a solo pursuit for Meredith. Thomas Malkin, Hartley Coleridge, Barbara FoUett, and Stanislaw Lem also played alone. Friedrich Nietzsche played in the imaginary world of King Squirrel with his sister; C. S. Lewis played in Boxen with his brother.
Worldplay looked to be constructive, that is ...

In the real world the empty page might scare the writer. as the blank screen might intimidate the programmer, but now individuals found themselves in the position of having to "boot up" an entire universe of meaning, without any easy reference to the constellation of familiar objects that tend to reinforce the tentative definitions obf newly ereated artifacts. Say, for example, one wished to create a chair in cyberspace, circa 1985. The most that can be said is that this "chair" won't look ve...

Haldane did not foresee the computer, the most potent
agent of social change during the last fifty years. He
expected his Daedalus, destroyer of gods and of men,
to be a biologist. Instead, the Daedalus of this century
turned out to be John von Neumann, the mathematician
who consciously pushed mankind into the era of
computers. Von Neumann knew well what he was doing.
Soon after the end of the second world war, he
started the Princeton computer project. Like Haldane's
Daedalus, he had dreams ...

This is often the way it is in physics. Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort. . . . The most important thing accomplished by the discovery o...

The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures,
the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by
virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t
engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom
up to make us happy.
And so, there is a growing perception in the gaming community:
Reality, compared to games, is broken.
In fact, it is more than a perception. It’s a phenom...

. . in real life mistakes are likely to be irrevocable. Computer simulation, however, makes it economically practical to make mistakes on purpose. If you are astute, therefore, you can leam much more than they cost. Further¬ more, if you are at all discreet, no one but you need ever know you made a mistake.

Anyone who sees a hurricane coming should warn others. I see a hurricane coming.
Over the next generation or two, ever larger numbers of
people, hundreds of millions, will become immersed in virtual
worlds and online games. While we are playing, things
we used to do on the outside, in “reality,” won’t be happening
anymore, or won’t be happening in the same way. You
can’t pull millions of person-hours out of a society without
creating an atmospheric-level event.
If it happens in a ...

Well, first thing’s first: we need to expand. We need to create a second base, and a third, and a fourth. We need to use our resources to build more resource-gathers, and fast. The enemy scouts are likely approaching already.
How might we do that? Well, there are only so many ways to make money in this world. We already have a day-job, which will act kind of like our home base, so now we need to expand to other types of revenue-producing activities that will serve as our satellite bases. T...

If the cloud is a vast array of personal computer processors, then why not add your own laptop or desktop computer to it? It in a certain way it already is. Whenever you are online, whenever you click on a link, or create a link, your processor is participating in the yet larger cloud, the cloud of all computer chips online. I call this cloud the One Machine because in many ways it acts as one supermegacomputer.
The majority of the content of the web is created within this one virtual compu...